Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and one or two others) told us which artists mat- tered. The sixties changed that. Pop art, minimalist art, and a host of other de- velopments caught the critics off guard, and for a decade or more the artists filled the critics' role; Leo Castelli and other leading dealers made decisions mainly by listening to artists. Increasingly, though, auction houses, with their slick marketing techniques, were becoming the primary arbiters of quality. "I know a lot of collectors who look to the auc- tion catalogues to define contemporary art today," Deitch said recently. "The museums are not really articulating this in a coherent way. The market provides the structure, and when you ask who are the major artists, it's basically What are their prices?' " Deitch sometimes sounds a bit rueful about his part in forging the nexus of art and money. "I helped create this whole thing of a professional art- advisory service, and also this fusion of d . " h ld " I ' art an entertaInment, e to me. m not sure which one the old school de- . " spises more. Deitch has no problem doing busi- ness with the new wave of collectors. As he puts it, "The hedge-fund people are brilliant. They get very good professional advice, and they have a tremendous amount of information on prices, prove- nance, condition, and so forth available to them through the Internet. It's true that some of them look on art mainly as a business investment, but others are in- tellectually curious and see it as part of a civilized life." A museum curator told me recently that he finds something "raven- ous and voracious" about the new collec- tors, a tendency to devour all the infor- mation they can find about an artist, and then to make very fast decisions-the same way they make decisions in the financial markets. "These young guys were born in a media society," according to Philippe Ségalot, Christiè s former in- ternational head of contemporary art, who left in 2001 to start, with two col- leagues, a private art-advisory business. (One of his principal clients is François Pinault, the French luxury-goods mag- nate, whose holdings include Christie's.) "They identifY much more with contem- porary art than with modern art, and theyre highly competitive. They want to surpass the best museums, and by col- lecting contemporary you can do that, 72 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 12, 2007 because you are quicker, richer, and more reactive-you don't need a board of trust- ees to approve what you buy." A few of the new collectors have ad- opted highly specific goals. Aby Rosen, the German-born real-estate developer whose acquisitions include Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the Gramercy Park Hotel, and whose town house on the Upper East Side overflows with WarhoYs celebrity portraits (hardly the artist's most significant work), is said to view art as an aspect of his business-a capital asset that complements his own- ership of landmark architecture and the pleasure he takes in associating with art- ists. Some of the younger collectors es- tablish "positions" in one or more artists, whose market value they then stand to influence. Daniel Loeb, a forty-five- year-old hedge-funder, owns about sixty works-paintings, drawings, and prints-by Martin Kippenberger, an influential and provocative German art- ist who died in 1997, at the age of forty- four, and whose prices have risen impres- sively in the past few years. Loeb's collection also includes works by Cecily Brown, Richard Prince, Peter Doig, Mike Kelley, Kai Althoff: and other con- temporaries, several of whom he and his wife (who collects feminist art) have met at Larry G ago sian' s dinner parties. The most successful hedge-fund owner of all is Steven Cohen, whose SAC Capital Advisors has reportedly earned its investors an average annual re- turn of nearly forty per cent since 1992. According to a 2006 story in the Wall Street Journal, Cohen, who rarely agrees to be interviewed, has bought close to a billion dollars' worth of art since he started collecting, in 2000. He keeps some of the more startling examples-Marc Qginn's self-portrait head made of the artist's fro- zen blood, for example-in the SAC offices in Stamford, Connecticut, where (according to the Journal) rows of traders wear fleece jackets to ward off the air- conditioned chill, and Cohen sits at his desk, clad in a worn sweater and jeans, tirelessly tracking the financial markets on eight TV screens. Cohen guards his privacy and spends most evenings at home, but he attends important auctions and other art-world events. "Cohen is the real thing," Deitch told me. "He really connects with the art." It seems legitimate to wonder what effect these new collectors, whose pas- sion for art is (relatively speaking) about six minutes old, are having on the kind of work that rises to the top in the new, global art business. "I think that the spec- tacular painting which already sells itself on the printed page is what you will see being most successful in this market," Sotheby s Tobias Meyer said. "The phys- ical presence of the work is not the pri- mary stimulant-they will want to see it already make a lot of impact on the printed page." That sounds like the see- at-a-glance accessibility of advertising art, which happens to be a prime source for the work of Koons, Prince, Mu- rakami, and a score of other top-selling contemporary masters. It also suggests a kind of art that can just as well be bought on the Internet, and Deitch confirms that this is the case. "We do it all the time," he told me. "People will ask me to send them a digital image of the next available thing by an artist whose work they know and like, and they will buy from that. It's completely normal in our b . " USlness. Charles Saatchi, the most influential collector-dealer-exhibitor of contempo- rary art during the eighties and nineties, is a big user of the Internet these days. Saatchi lives in London, rarely travels to the United States, and knows the art so well that, according to Deitch, he may not always feel a need to see the origi- nals. To a previous generation of collec- tors, who cared a lot about a work's physical presence, that would seem like buying blind. "When I arrived, in the seventies," Deitch said, reflectively, "it was still the older model. Collectors were psychiatrists or lawyers-intellec- tual people, not the social or business élite." They bought mainly through dealers, with whom they built up long- term relationships, and they sometimes had work sent to them on approval and lived with it for a while before deciding to buy. "The art world used to be a com- munity, but now it's an industry," Deitch said. "It's not just a market-it's a visual- culture industry, like the :film industry or the fashion industry, and it merges with both of them. Julian Schnabel makes movies, Marc Jacobs does collaborations with artists. We live in an increasingly culture-based economy, and the value of art is in synch with other tangible assets now, like real estate. I try to act respon-